Archive for October, 2013

In July 2012 an anonymous vandal changed the name of the shape that appears on the symbol Tokelau from “Tuluma” to “Flopiorkdich” in the English Wikipedia article about it. It stayed there until I fixed it today.

In the meantime that word spread out to other websites. Google for it. It was also copied as is to the Greek version of that article, and I fixed it there, too.

It reminds me of the story of the weird wrong Hebrew spelling of messiah, which was being mindlessly copied from the English Wikipedia to other websites until I fixed it. (Hello again, Pastor Roland Gloria Jr.! I really want to visit your church some day.) I wonder whether it’s possible to build a bot that would flag such edits, where a vandal adds a word that can’t be found elsewhere using Famous Search Engines.

I don’t have much more to say about it. I haven’t lived there since 1991. My sister kept living there, and I visited her at my old apartment in 2005, but she moved since then, so nothing is tying me to that place except childhood memories. Still, it’s kinda upsetting that that’s the reason why I hear about it in the news. I wish that I’d hear about it in a happier context. For example, if a Metro station would be open there. But it’s unlikely that it will have one any time soon.

When I study foreign languages, it’s very important for me to know the words that explain causation. Words like “then”, “therefore”, “so”, “consequently”. And it surprises me that textbooks don’t teach them early. Maybe it says something about how my mind is wired? That to me it’s important to understand the explanations and meanings of everything, and that other people care less about it?

Here are some of those words in a few languages:

Catalan: doncs, per això, idò, llavors

Spanish: entonces, pues

French: donc, puis

Russian: поэтому, потому, значит, так что, стало быть

Esperanto: do

Polish: więc, zatem

Italian: perciò, quindi, dunque, pertanto

Portuguese: então, por isso, portanto

Hebrew: אז, לכן

Can you add it for your language? I tried to find it for Hindi, for example. My textbook (Rupert Snell, “Complete Hindi”) didn’t have anything clear like in the first few lessons (or maybe I missed it).

I always celebrate when I receive spam in a language in which I haven’t yet received spam. I just received spam in Serbian for the first time. It was in the Cyrillic alphabet; Serbian can also be written in Latin, and it is frequently done in Serbia, possibly even more frequently than in Cyrillic, even though the government prefers Cyrillic.

This makes me wonder: Is Serbian in Cyrillic popular and important enough for spamming in it, or did the silly spammer just use Google Translate to translate to Serbian and got the result in Cyrillic, because that’s what Google Translate does?

If you know Serbian, can you please tell me whether it looks real or machine-translated? Words like “5иеарс” and the spaces before the punctuation marks give me a strong suspicion that it’s machine translation, but I might be wrong.